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First Electric Cars Have Power Industry Worried
Hugh Pickens writes "Jonathan Fahey writes for AP that as the first mass-market electric cars go on sale next month, the power industry faces a huge growth opportunity, with SoCal Edison expecting to be charging 100,000 cars by 2015 and California setting a goal of 1 million electric vehicles by 2020. But utility executives are worried that the difficulty of keeping the lights on for the first crop of buyers — and their neighbors — could slow the growth of this industry because it's inevitable that electric utilities will suffer some difficulties early on. 'We are all going to be a lot smarter two years from now,' says Mark Perry, director of product planning for Nissan North America. When plugged into a home charging station the first Leafs and Volts will draw 3,300 Watts and take about 8 hours to deliver a full charge, but both carmakers may soon boost that to 6,600 Watts. The Tesla Roadster, an electric sports car with a huge battery, can draw 16,800 Watts. That means that adding an electric vehicle or two to a neighborhood can be like adding another house, and it can stress the equipment that services those houses. The problem is that transformers that distribute power from the electrical grid to homes are often designed to handle less than about 12,000 watts so the extra stress on a transformer from one or two electric vehicles could cause it to overheat and fail, knocking out power to the block."
Good! Maybe one the shit blows up they can replace the 50 year old hardware that's been causing brownouts in California since the early 80s.
Worried? Build more capacity then. It's not like your customers have been or will be getting all that electricity for free (or even cheap in some cases).
The problem is that transformers that distribute power from the electrical grid to homes are often designed to handle less than about 12,000 watts
often designed to handle 12,000 watts? Hogwash. That's 50 amp service (in North America, where homes are almost always supplied at 240VAC). Most new homes in North America receives at minimum 200 amp service. Even my rural 1956 rancher has 70 amp service.
And this is a single home. Most transformers supply several houses. If there are any transformers rated at 12KW, they are very few and far between, and probably service locations that aren't likely to have electric cars anyhow.
Shoulda thought of that several years ago when you started pushing electric cars, and I would blame the car manufacturers and electric stations equally - if you have 100amps into the house, you should be able to pull 100 amps. If you don't, then you need to contact the electricity company who are then suitably forewarned. Also, the car companies never mention just how much power a car pulls (but yet we're told to worry about 40W bulbs being on for five minutes more than usual!) or that it might need specialised equipment to charge.
I worked in an inner-city school a few years back. We blew the street fuse by plugging in a laptop trolley with 16 90W adaptors. Did we blame the laptop manufacturer's? The school electrician? No, we blamed the electricity company for being so stupid that the *specified* maximum current available for our site was nowhere near what blew the street fuse for the ENTIRE street.
Sort it out, like you should have always have sorted it out. And charge people more if they place a burden on your system and make them get specialised lines that cost more. Problem solved (and it'll also keep electric cars in the bin where they should be - what we *really* need from an ecological point of view is a lithium shortage right now).
... And apparently we are again not ready for it. Electric cars were common decades ago, and the electric service did not collapse. Now we have two large auto manufacturers debuting cars that can be charged at home - even though few people will be able to afford the entire setup right now - and for some reason the power companies are proclaiming that the sky is falling. Hell the power companies have a solid business model right now, as few people are in a position to maintain their lifestyles without the electricity they currently pay for. So the problem for the electric companies then is what, again?
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Assuming the cars charge with 220v, this represents 15 amperes, 30 amperes and around 75 amperes. Most houses will have a 15 amp circuit available - probably you have some appliance plugged into it. Not all that many will have an extra 30 amp circuit, and none have a 75 amp circuit anywhere.
As far as the worries of the power companies: if the greens were serious, they would get behind this. Of course, if you want to reduce our usage of oil, we do need a few new power plants. Nuclear would be best, but even if you try to go full-on green, the eco-nuts will oppose them all. Don't bother asking what they would support - most of them apparently think that power magically comes out of the wall-socket, with no need for nasty things like power plants...
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
Most charging will be done at night, when electricity use (home and business) is otherwise low.
They had plenty of time to invest their profits into upgrading the power grid to anticipate future demand, and didn't. Those short-sighted sons of syphilitic bitches can go fuck themselves with a Saturn V rocket and no lube.
I write sci-fi for metalheads
I've already started converting my house to run on gasoline, thus leaving enough electricity for charging my car.
Mostly random stuff.
The power industry needs to pay attention to what ISPs are doing to solve similar problems.
1.) Spend upgrade money on creating new classes of service, rather than worrying about upgrading low profit transformers. The electricity for your lights, which you need right away, should be tagged differently than the electricity for your car, which can wait for delivery. Then, make more money by charging extra for uninterrupted "light electricity."
2.) Spend more money investigating people's power usage, and threatening to shut off everyone who uses an electric car. (The power companies do this already looking for marijuana grow-lights, so this should be cheap to implement.) Couple these "deep power inspection" with blockage measures so that electric cars only get a trickle charge. Cap people's usage so that the power to the "bad actors" gets shutoff when they exceed their cap.
3.) Implement a propaganda campaign castigating electric car users for actually using the electricity that they paid for.
4.) Demand public subsidies to upgrade the power system, and use the resulting money on items # 1 - 3 above.
With these simple measures, both our power system and our broadband Internet delivery can continue to slide to third-world status, and useful employment can be extended to armies of consultants.
From the article you linked:
"Before this week's power outages, California Governor Gray Davis's efforts to secure adequate supplies of electricity appeared to have stabilized the situation, at least until summer. The state is paying $45 million a day to subsidize energy purchases by the state's two major utility companiesSouthern California Edison and Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E).
Recently the governor announced that some long-term contracts have been negotiated in the $70-80 per megawatt range."
The state spending $45 million a day hardly seems like DEregulation to me.
What they call "deregulation" of the power industry in California was actually a change in regulations, not the elimination of regulations. For instance, Wikipedia says:
"The California energy market allowed for energy companies to charge higher prices for electricity produced out-of-state"
"the Death Star group of scams played on the market rules which required the state to pay "congestion fees" to alleviate congestion on major power lines"
"in 2000, wholesale prices were deregulated, but retail prices were regulated for the incumbents as part of a deal with the regulator, allowing the incumbent utilities to recover the cost of assets that would be stranded as a result of greater competition, based on the expectation that "frozen" rates would remain higher than wholesale prices".
"By keeping the consumer price of electricity artificially low, the California government discouraged citizens from practicing conservation. In February 2001, California governor Gray Davis stated, "Believe me, if I wanted to raise rates I could have solved this problem in 20 minutes."
That's over-regulation, not deregulation. Deregulation would be letting anyone produce, transmit, and sell electricity at any price the consumers would pay.
The real problem is that utility executives are lemmings that all want to run off the same cliff at the same time. SCE happens to think they are the leader in providing to the electric car industry, and they have been keeping their heads down in the California battles lately. PG&E has had several messes on their hands between that proposition in June and San Ramon, and since CA is likely to lead in adoption, it is a CA utility that the rest of the industry will look to and so SCE gets it by default.
SCE has been wringing their hands for years and posturing themselves to the electric car and plug in hybrid as an excuse to demand distribution rate increases that they haven't been able to get for years. That is what the other utility executives see. They see hand-wringing that can posture for distribution rate increases that they haven't been able to get through their utility commissions for years due to opposition to increasing rates. Utility rates are worse than even the usual political sausage factory. Maybe the consumer groups and enviros will go for the rate increases if packaged with the plug in car. That is the whole reason for all the utility company angst. It is manufactured for the theater of public, and public utility commission, opinion.
The manufactured angst is their current cliff, just like downsizing was in the 90's.
In their defense, maybe they are right. Maybe they really haven't had the money in the distribution accounts to pay for upgrades. I know more than 99.995% of the people out there about power rates in general, but that still leaves at least the 1000 or so people spread throughout the IOUs that actually understand their own individual rates and how they affect their accounts down to the GL. You would go insane if you actually tried to understand that from the outside rather than just understand how it affects your house or facility.
To a couple of other points.
1) The power distribution, and transmission, equipment installed thirty to sixty years ago was so preposterously overengineered at the time that it is still cranking along nicely. In the words of my primary high voltage expert "a cool transformer is a happy transformer". By and large they can sit there well past the apex of the failure curve and keep going indefinitely. The stuff that is in the air and on the ground is by and large fine until it fails, and easy to replace when it does. All of the handwringing about the smart grid is also largely a bunch of BS. The grid is a lot smarter than you would know from the outside. The problem is and was broken regulation. The way utilities used to make money was they built new generation to serve new load. Transmission only existed to get the hostage generation to the hostage load. The transmission system was not previously regulated in such a way that would lead to what America has needed for years, which is the super-highway concept of high voltage lines that would allow markets to properly function. It really isn't even regulated properly now.
2) Continuing the theme, deregulation was not the problem in California. A deregulated electricity market looks nothing like a deregulated market for most other commodities. A deregulated market for electricity exists in multiple and overlapping frameworks of regulation. The problem in CA was the regulated model they selected for their deregulated market. They took the mostly functional British model and applied it to California. What they did not understand was that in Britain there was a) a massive oversupply and b) a utility industry that was so broken that the utilities had a built in ability for utilities to do things like "install meters" and make money. Since California is in a net import situation, and had meters, the market conditions had nothing to do with their model. The proximate cause of the so called "energy crisis" also was actually physical. It was the explosion on the El Paso pipeline in 2000 that jacked up prices and limited supply in CA even ahead of the general massive NG spike. Those two fact
Well in this case, in many places, it is pretty much impossible to add to the infrastructure because of all the NIMBYs out there along with environmental regulation and environmental impact studies and reports (no, you can't build a substation there because of this frog, and you can't build transmission lines there because of this butterfly). It all adds up to "you can't increase the infrastructure without a concomitant increase in prices of many fold on existing customers. In many (most?) places in the US rates are set by public utility agencies and cannot go up that much very quickly. The end users (who just want to vote themselves bread and circuses and can't be bothered to understand the financial/environmental/business situation that these power companies are in) go up in arms and "follow the people's issue of the day" politicians go all ape-shit on the power companies and further regulate them. It all comes down to one hell of a sticky situation - one for which I must say I am not smart enough to find a resolution for.